Insights from Professor David Crystal's Lecture

Hello and welcome. My name is Matt Ellman. I'm a teacher trainer here at Cambridge University Press and we're coming to you live from Robinson College at the University of Cambridge where we're holding the Better Learning Conference at the moment. And I'm joined by linguistics legend Professor David Crystal, author, writer and lecturer. And over the next hour we'll be talking to him about his career and work, changes in the English language and what it all means. for English language teachers as well. Don't forget that you can ask your own questions to Professor Crystal in the comments box underneath this video and we'll put those to him towards the end of the hour. So David welcome, hello. Well thank you Matt, glad to be here. Let's start by one thing that comes across in all of your books and your talks, and that's your passion for English. I wonder if you could tell us how you keep that going. How do you stay motivated and interested in what you do? Oh, because of the nature of the language, really, or the nature of languages in general. You see, the beauty about language is it's everywhere, to state the obvious, but that means it's varied so much. There are so many different varieties of the language. Turn around any corner, you're going to see a new variety. of the language and it's basically saying to me, hey David, come and talk to me, you know, come and listen to me, come and read me. And then the other big dimension is that language changes so rapidly. Whatever the English language was like yesterday, it's different today, it's going to be different tomorrow and it's so unpredictable in so many ways. And so that's another factor, you know, what's going to happen next? And that generates a kind of curiosity and enthusiasm. And then the way in which people are so creative in their use of language. You know, however you've been taught English or whatever your language is, there comes a point when you want to play with it a bit. I mean, you might want to play with it professionally and become a novelist or a poet or a dramatist, or you just might want to crack a joke with somebody or put on a silly voice or any of these things. And it's that innate creativity that people have, which you see from a very early age in young children, you know, playing with the language from age, you know, three years old. or four, that sort of period. And all of that produces a fascination and it's a fascination which generates enthusiasm and passion as you say. Is that language play something that's unique to English? Oh no, every language has players. They play in different ways of course. Some languages like to play with sophisticated oratory for instance. A language that has been written down will obviously have a great number of graphic forms of play. like crossword puzzles or Scrabble would be a better example perhaps which is pretty universal now but only of course in those languages which have been written down and of the six thousand or so languages in the world there are still a couple of thousand that have never been written down yet and and so they'll play with language in rather different ways and then there's another dimension to it if you have a radio and television network or that in which you get for example stand-up comedians and things of that kind or soaps that have a comedic input then that will generate people wanting to do the same sort of thing and they'll they'll copy what they see or hear on television and radio and play with language in those ways so the variety of language play is just as strong there was a very good example in the talk that you gave just now of that the way that we use language play or the language players used in slogans and advertising is that something that you see continuing this Advertising is one of the two big professional areas of language play. The other is newspaper headlines in certain types of newspaper where the headline writer wants to grab your attention and so the person does it by just playing with the language in a certain kind of way. I'm remembering one now. If you're into cricket in Britain, you will know very well, Matt, don't you, that it sometimes rains in Britain. And as a result, the cricket... match is called off and so traditionally there was always a headline or a poster which after the cricket match was stopped which says rain stops play Rain stops play and anybody with a history of cricket awareness in Britain will remember that headline. Well one day in one cricket match a snake, an adder, got onto the pitch and actually bit a batsman. And he was in great pain. So they called off the match. And the headline the next day was, Pain Stops Play. So if you know the background, you'll understand the joke. If you don't understand the background, you have no idea. what that expression actually means. So newspaper headlines, yes. And advertising, the other example you mentioned also, loves to play with language in that way. And that means playing with anything, playing with pronunciation, playing with grammar, playing with vocabulary, playing with spelling. Heinz beans, for instance. Beans means Heinz with a Z instead of the S. Well, it's a memorable slogan, but that's all language play. And from the point of view of teaching, teachers, is there a place for that kind of play in lessons and does that benefit language learning? Oh, I think it does. And people sometimes think that language play is a very sophisticated thing so it's for advanced learners only. Well, some of the more sophisticated kinds of play indeed will not be capable of being used and appreciated until later. But from the very beginning, children want to play with language. It's what they love to do. Language is fun right from the very outset. The very first things that babies hear when they're out of the womb and in the real world for the first time is language play. No baby that's just come into the world is going to hear their parents, the parents or the midwife or the doctor or the nurse saying, you know, good morning, you are a baby. This is a hospital. You have just been born. You know, you don't get that kind of thing. What you get is, oh, you lovely little baby, you are gorgeous baby. And you get all this lovely, playful baby talk that everybody does, some more than others. And so from the very beginning, you're used to the phenomenon of, hey, what's going on here? There's a strange kind of language being used. Sometimes people don't do it. Sometimes they do do it. And when they do do it, it's really fun. So I think play is there right from the very beginning of language acquisition. What strikes me as you give that example is the physicality. of it and how that impacts on, I suppose, on the child's language. Yeah, and the linguistic structure of it too. People think that baby talk, although it might be quite instinctive, has no structure. Oh, it does. If I say to you, oh, you lovely little Baba, you are, you are, you are, there are three things going on there. First of all, there's a great deal of lip rounding. Oh, you lovely little Baba. I mean, that's unusual for English, isn't it? We don't lip round very much in English. We do so when we're talking to babies. talking to pussycats and things, or pussy, pussy, pussy, and, of course, talking to your most intimate associates, or can I have a little kiss then from your best beloved, for instance. But lip rounding is not normal, so playfully it is. And then the second thing is the pitch range of a piece of baby talk. Did you notice how I started very high? Here you lovely little baby. Then I went very low. This is very unusual in everyday conversation. I don't meet you in the street and say, Matt, how are you today? It's lovely. to see you. You know, I don't use pitch range in that way, but we do with baby talk. And the third thing about baby talk, did you notice the repetition? Yes, you are, you are, you are. Again, we don't do that kind of thing in everyday conversation. I don't meet you in the street and say, oh, Matt, hello, how are you? How are you? How are you? How are you? You know, we don't do that. But in baby talk, we do. So language play breaks all the rules, if you like. And that's part of its attraction. So that suggests, if you're a teacher, that suggests that perhaps repetition is going to benefit students. It suggests that exaggerated physicality and exaggerated pitch might also benefit them in some way. Is that fair to assume? So long as the context is motivating towards enjoyment rather than intellectual learning of some kind. Because to repeat, you know, this is a table, this is a table, you know, ten times, although it's sometimes done, is not really a most motivating experience. But if you're dealing with something that is fun, like, say, you're playing with puppets, or watching a cartoon or just working out the way children might play a game, or for a more adult-type audience, some of the more sophisticated forms of enjoyment, joke-telling and things like that, then that kind of emphasis on pitch range and repetition will be, I imagine, extremely valuable. Excellent. If you've just joined us, we're here live with Professor David Crystal at Robinson College in Cambridge, part of the Cambridge University Press Better Learning Conference. David, you mentioned there that it's changes in the language that keep you motivated, keep you interested. Are there any recent changes in the English language that you think it would be particularly useful for teachers to know about? Oh, lots and lots, really. We don't want to overemphasise this. Change only affects a couple of percent of the language at any one time. you know, 90, I don't know what, 95, 98% of the language that you and I are using now is exactly the same as we would have been using if we'd been doing this interview in 1990 and in 20 years time it'll be the same. But that 2, 3, 4% would have been the same. whatever it is, is really interesting. And the reason why I'm vague about the percentage is that it depends very much on which aspect of language we're thinking of. With vocabulary, for instance, it's a higher percentage. Maybe about 5% of the vocabulary of English either goes out of use or new words come into use in any given year. Two or three words come into the English language every day, according to some of the studies. Every day? Every day, yes, absolutely. Or two or three... new senses of old words or new senses coming from new contexts like technology, which we can talk about in a bit if you like. So vocabulary is the place where most changes obviously manifest, but, and grammar by contrast, relatively little. There are some grammatical changes that are taking place. For instance, the changes in the auxiliary verbs. Most learners of English at one time or another will have been taught that there's... There's an auxiliary verb, must. You must do this, I must do that, he must, she must do this sort of thing. Well, the frequency of use of the word must, which used to be quite high, has gone down and down and down and down and down and down and down. And instead of must, these days people are saying have to. You have to do this, man. If I say, you must do this, man, it sounds rather authoritarian, doesn't it? And I'm telling you. Whereas if I say, you have to do this, I'm basically saying, you have the option of saying yes or no. It's a friendlier kind of approach. Is that the sign of a more egalitarian society? I think it is, yes, absolutely. A more egalitarian society. However you interpret it, the statistics are very, very clear. When you go into the big corpora of data, you will see must going down and have to going up. So there are some grammatical changes, but not very many. And then we've got pronunciation, which of course is continuing to change in a steady, slow way, as it always has. The graphic side of things, orthography. Spelling, spelling doesn't like to change very much, it's a very conservative medium, but punctuation does. And so especially with the internet and the things that are happening there to the graphic medium, we're seeing a lot of changes in punctuation which surprise some people. Some people get very upset about it because they've been taught how to punctuate and now we're seeing the internet doing new things. And so it can be a bit of a surprise. So yes, there's change happening all over the place, but a different... rates depending upon different aspects of the language. I suppose for teachers the vocabulary, new vocabulary is fairly easy to get to grips with. Changes in grammar, maybe it's a good thing that there aren't that many of those because that tends to be much more difficult to deal with those from the point of view of materials or tests and things like that. Yes, it is. The problem with vocabulary is there is so much of it. If we're talking about two or three words coming in every day, I'm talking about words coming in to a fairly standard kind of way. of colloquial English and not yet talking about the new vocabulary from the different varieties of English around the world, you know. I'm talking just about say British English there but think about what's going on say in American English or Australian English or Indian English or all the other new varieties of English. Add that vocabulary and you've got a really massive mountain to climb or at least to try to cope with. So that is the main problem, the quantity of vocabulary. Yes, grammar Not so bad, so long as you've learned your... The basic rules of grammar haven't changed in 500 years. Is it necessary for learners to try and cope with all of that? I used to live in Malaysia, and there's a very distinct Malaysian dialect of English. They call it Manglish. Manglish, yeah. And I didn't speak that when I went over there. I kind of feel that learning that or experiencing that is part of your... That's part of... the joy of travelling, is it something that you feel students should be able to get to grips with or is there a kind of minimum core of English that you need to know in order to be able to travel and cope with these regional differences? Oh yes, my answer is both. There are two big forces that drive language always. One is the need for intelligibility. We have to understand each other. And that motivates the development of a standard language, standard English in this particular case. And standard English is essentially a written form of English. printed form of English, which some people speak quite naturally, but not very many. Most people speak a regional form of English to begin with, and they learn standard English in school. So intelligibility is there to guarantee we understand each other within a country, and these days, of course. internationally. The other big force driving language is the need for identity. We have to say who we are and where we're from and that motivates the growth of accents and dialects both at a national level and an international level. I want to sound British I don't want to sound American. Americans want to sound American not sounding British and so on for all the varieties of English around the world. Now when you get to a country like Malaysia or Singapore for instance or R&D Indeed, so many countries now, we see two forms of English in place. We see a natural, evolving kind of English, which you learn on the streets with your family, with the kids, and so on. And that sometimes has a label, like Manglish. Sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes it's just called the local Creole or something like that. And then you go to school and you learn standard English. And my point is that one needs both. It's not that one should replace the other or one should criticize. the other. You need both because we are human beings that are both outward looking, we need to understand the rest of the world and they us, and inward looking, we need to be ourselves and not like the rest of the world. And so we need both. So the question is, how do you implement this balance in not just a teaching context, but in a widespread political context? Because we're talking here about, you know, curriculum design and, you know, national policy. I remember in Singapore, for instance, some years ago, I was last there in the late 1990s, and there was a big controversy going on as to whether Singlish, in this particular case, should be supported or dispensed with. There was a criticism of a soap that was on television at the time, and I think the Prime Minister at one point said, they really have to stop speaking Singlish on this soap, you know. They must speak standard English, otherwise what will our children and what will... the viewers be able to do and if Singlish takes over we won't understand the rest of the world and they will not understand us. But at the same time, Singlish, he said, you know, we want to be Singapore and not the rest of the world, where Singlish of course would be a perfect marker of identity. So you can't have your cake and eat it, you know, you need both and somehow one has to devise a language policy which allows both. Yes, that's interesting and at a very small level, maybe at the level of individual schools, you may have seen the story recently about a school that banned the use of the of the word like. Yes. Yeah. Well, that showed a misunderstanding of what the word like is all about. When a kid said, what people don't like about the word like, and this is the context of, you know, so I was like saying this and she was like doing that and I was like doing the other. That's the kind of context we're talking about. And what irritates people is the overuse of it. Any word that is overused will irritate. I can make you hate any word in the English language. language by overusing it really. I really can, no really. I can start really using a word for really just a few seconds now and really and every observer of this interview is going to say please David stop using the word really. You're using it to I hate the word really. Really. Now same thing has happened to like. Like actually has a very important role in narrative. In linguistics we call it quotative like. Because if somebody says, so I went like, wow, write that down. How will you write it down? You say, I went. Inverted commas, wow, close the inverted commas. It's like a quotation. And like replaces the quotation marks. And so it's a very important feature of natural narrative. So a kid who's using like all the time is actually telling you a very fluent... story but unfortunately overusing this way of linking the various parts of the story now some people say well why don't you replace the word like with something like the word say so I said wow and the answer to that is that like actually has a more general meaning because it can be used in relation to facial expressions. So I can in conversation to you go like this, I can say, so I went like, and the gesture, I can't now say say, because I can't say a gesture, can I? You know, the like actually has a broader usage than any other verb like I said this or I went this or whatever it might be. So it has a real value and I don't see it as a a sign of deterioration in the language, I see it actually as a sign of increasing expressive richness in the language, but kids who use it, and adults now of course, who use it, have to beware that if they don't overuse it, otherwise it will draw attention to itself and that will distract from the meaning of the message and that's always a bad thing. I notice that it's always was like or I went like, so the verb be... It's always the verb to be, got to be there, the verb to be has got to be there. As if something... that teachers should be teaching as a form of reporting speech using be like? Well it's a usage that has certainly come into being. It's not new. You can trace that use of the word like back to the 18th century but it's new in the sense of frequency and a new generation has grown up really loving it and so well I would now make a distinction between production and listening comprehension and to some extent reading comprehension. comprehension as well. The kids have got to realize that this is a widely used construction. They can, if you like, be taught to use it. Now I'm out of my comfort zone now because I'm not a teacher, remember, I don't teach in class day by day. How you teach it and when you teach it is a matter of curriculum and things like that. But at some point they have got to know about it if they are going to encounter natural conversation amongst kids of their own age in other cultures. and I would say that that is a given they're going to have that and if they're not going to travel to those cultures they're going to see it online and any any YouTube experience or anything like this is going to present them with this construction at some point so getting to grips with it and not being scared of it and being confident to use it but not to overuse it I think it's very important. If you're just joining us we're here live from Robinson College at the University of Cambridge part of the Cambridge University Press Better Learning Conference and we've got the great pleasure of being joined by Professor David Crystal, who's talking to us about changes in the English language. I suppose the logical question following on from all of this is how do teachers stay on top of these changes? What can they do to kind of keep up with what's going on? With great difficulty. It's easier now than it used to be, thanks to the Internet. Once upon a time, if you wanted to find out about Australian English or South African English or Nigerian English or whatever it might be, you had to go there. or at least meet somebody from there. These days, it's just so easy. If I want to find out about South African English, I just go to Google and type in South African English. Up will come lots of South African sites, newspapers, and things like that, political party statements with all the terminology of the local politics from South Africa. And these days, of course, quite a lot of South African pronunciation coming in as well. So I can tune my ears to all of this that's going on. Now the question is, you know, how do you grade this in terms of curriculum? My view on this is that one should expose students to this at the earliest possible age or stage of language learning. Just like language play, exposure to new varieties of English is not something that should be seen as an advanced level because it's there from the outset. And the kids these days are going to be encountering it. on the internet anyway, you know, in social media and things like this. So I think it's important to integrate it somehow. And I'm remembering now some of my first exposures to learning foreign languages where I had the fortune to be exposed to it in this way. I remember learning on the BBC once upon a time German from a series called Kommit, Wir sprechen Deutsch. And the first episode of that had a proper piece of German. learning. You know, where I learned a certain construction and a certain bit of vocabulary, like traditionally you would. And then the presenter said, OK, now we're just going into that bar over there, just have a listen. You're not going to understand all of it, it doesn't matter. Just get a feel for the rhythm of the language. the speed of the language, the way they interact with each other, and just let it wash over you. And I thought, this is so good, because it's making the language experience real for me. I still can't communicate very much with them, but I'm getting a sense of... Well, how I have to tune my ears in order to understand my simple sentences when they're being spoken by that guy who's going to say them in a slightly different way from my teacher. And I thought this was very valuable. And I think the same thing might apply to English. Absolutely. It's interesting that use, I suppose, at that point it was television that was the technology that's enabling that. And the other thing that's very difficult for teachers to keep on top of is changes in technology. Now, you've written quite a bit about how... language has evolved along with technology. How do you see that going in the future? Oh, very unpredictable. I mean, that's the thing about technology. It is so unpredictable. You don't know what's going to happen next, and every consequence of what happens next is going to have linguistic implications. I'll give you an example of this happening. In 2006, something very strange happened. Up until then, people sent... text messages to each other. So I send you a text message on the mobile phone, on your cell phone, and it says something very important like, you know, I am on the train, or I am eating corn flakes, and I send the message to you, and you need to know this, because you're a friend or a spouse or something, and it's an important thing. If you had said to me in 2005, the next big thing is going to be you put those text messages on the internet so that everybody will be able to read them. I would have said you were nuts. But that's what happened. It was called Twitter. Twitter is SMS, a short messaging service for the internet. So now I send to Twitter, I am on the train or I am eating cornflakes. And anybody can read this now. And you think that'll never work. Twitter was the fastest growing internet experience of that 2006 and years following period. So hugely successful. Now, why? Because the prompt was, what are you doing? What are you doing? That was the 2006 prompt. Now, think of it from a linguistic point of view. You're going to answer that question. How are you going to answer it? You're going to have first-person pronouns. You're going to have present tenses. I am on the train. I am eating cornflakes. We are doing this. Then, in November 2009, Twitter changed its prompt. The new prompt was, and still is, you know, what's happening? Tell us what's happening. As soon as you get what's happening, everything changes. Third person pronouns now. This is happening, that's happening, he's doing something, she's doing something, they're doing something. Different tense forms. Something has just happened. Something is about to happen. And suddenly you realize that the language has suddenly become much more all encompassing than it was before. And Twitter became something more of a news reporting service than a personal trade off like text messaging. Now who would have predicted that in October? 2009 you see and at any point in time Twitter can change its policy again and the same for now any other Internet medium internet channel as soon as somebody changes the policy and talks about a new kind of privacy Situation or whatever it might be is an implication for language. So It's a bit unpredictable Having said that I don't see it as a big deal For teachers because as before only a tiny percentage of it internet language is different, makes the language different from what it was before. You know, you go online now in 2019 and you look at online reports from 29 or 1999 or 1989 and you look at the language and it's really basically the same. Just a few changes here and there, we're talking a low percentage, 1%, 2%, something like that. You're going to know about these changes, but it's not a big deal. know, in terms of the overall mass of the language that people have got to learn. Okay, and I guess similarly, how do you keep on top of things? We've got here at Cambridge, we've got the Cambridge Corpus, which is a huge body of English that allows us to track changes in the language. Have you got something similar that you work with? I just look at all these corpora, yeah. I've got access to at least a dozen corpora at home and some of these guys keep their corpus right up to date and of course Cambridge has its new world. dictionary which is every month I look at that just to see what have you guys found this month that I didn't know about before and there's usually words there that I hadn't come across before so you keep on on top of this kind of thing and when you do regular samples of usage using the devices that are available to at the moment like the big data corporate and and you use a clever bit of software that says what's new compared with last time it's one way of keeping in touch having said that. These days I always feel a little bit out of touch. Heck, you know, I'm in my late 70s. How am I going to keep in touch with the kids? Well, one answer is, go and ask them. So I visit schools quite a lot and talk to six... forms, that is kids of around about age 17, 18 doing A-level English language. Not usually much younger, but that sort of age range. And the reason is because some of my books are on the syllabus for A-level. And so I meet these kids. kids and we talk about this sort of thing and they are not slow in bringing me up to date on the latest slang and the latest things they say and I might hazard a particular thing to them and they say, you know, we don't do that anymore, I mean really David, you know, get up to date. I mean I can give you an example, text messaging abbreviations. You know, when text messaging started all these new abbreviations came in like C for C and U for U. later with an 8 in the middle rather than the syllable. And when it came in around about the early 2000s, this was thought to be the greatest thing ever by the youngsters. You know, this was really cool stuff. And adults, of course, criticized it enormously. And it developed into a kind of peak of usage around about 2008, 9, 10, something like that. Anyway, I used to go into schools, as I said. And one of the things I would do is, in advance, I'd ask the teacher to arrange with the kids. to get a collection of their texts together so we could look at the abbreviations and see how they were using them. Well, I was in a school just earlier this year and I'd asked the kids to do that and they showed me their text messages. There wasn't a single abbreviation to be seen. So I said to them, where have your abbreviations gone? And they looked at me as if I was from a different planet and said, you know, they're not cool anymore. We used to do that when we were kids, said these 16-year-olds, you know, at age 10. and 11. Maybe they're new, but by 16, oh, boring, you know. And then one kid clinched it for me. He said, I'll tell you when I stopped abbreviating. He said, I stopped when my dad started. You get the point? When adults steal young people's slang, it's no longer cool anymore. And certainly adults have started to do things like see you and things like that. So for the kid's point of view, let's move on. Let's find something different. Let's do emojis or something different. different that wasn't there before. I guess one thing that's happening there is that we don't use SMS messages so much anymore, which had a limit, they had a character limit. Messaging services now don't have that limit. And they have predictive texting and things like that, so you don't need the abbreviations as much as you used to. And in many ways, surely that kind of sensitivity to the context demonstrates quite advanced language proficiency, doesn't it? Oh yes, I mean this was one of the big myths about text messaging earlier on, that because because the kids were using abbreviations and things like that, it was going to affect their literacy. They're not spelling properly, they're going to end up having lousy literacy scores. Well, people started researching that. And what they showed, mainly psychologists rather than linguists, but what they showed was that texting actually increases literacy scores. Makes you better, a more literate person. Why? Because you're more likely to because text messaging and all the associated stuff is giving you extra practice in the language. I mean, what improves your reading and writing? If you read and write. The more you read and write, the better. Adults would say, or at least some of those early pedants would say, oh, but they're not reading Dickens or Shakespeare. No, they're not, but they are reading more than I was at their age. When did you last never see a teenager walking along the road reading and writing? all the time you know it's everywhere and so that kind of extra literacy was a very noticeable feature of the period along with this point and that is that abbreviations are breaking the rules if you ask a teenager in those days and still to some extent why do you use different language and they say cuz it's cool because it's fashionable because it's like with my mates and you say okay But if it's cool to break a rule, you have to know that the rule is there in the first place in order to break it. In other words, you have to have quite a sophisticated knowledge of spelling and things. The best texters always are the best spellers. And if you are a poor speller, for example, if you have dyslexia, you're not a good texter as a result in those days because you just can't handle the rules. So it's a much more sophisticated thing than people think. And I see it, once again, as a good feature. of language skills development rather than something bad. Excellent. Before we go on to the next question about Professor Crystal's books, remember that you can send your own questions to us by adding them in the comments box just below and we'll put those to him towards the end of this interview. But you mentioned your books there that you go into schools and present those. You've just released the third edition of the Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language. And I wonder if you could tell us what's different in... this new edition from the previous edition? Ooh, yes. Well, it is so different. It's the third edition, yes, and if you look at the changes between the first edition and the second, there really wasn't that much. The big difference, of course, was... was the arrival of the internet. In 1995, the first edition, for most people, there was no internet. I mean, the World Wide Web had begun in 1991. Most people didn't start emailing until the mid-1990s, you know? And so nothing on the internet in 1995. And then second edition, 2003, oh, I've got to put chapters in on the internet. So fine. But between 2003 and 2018, when I finished it, so much has happened in terms of internet activity apart from anything else so that section has grown enormously so you know think social media to think 2003 right no Facebook 2004 no YouTube 2005 no Twitter 2006 etc etc no whatsapp no Instagram so suddenly you realize you've got to put a huge amount of extra stuff in there so that was one of the big differences and then the points of detail everywhere the you the fact that all the statistics on English as a global language had to be re-researched. Because everybody wants to know how many people speak English as a global language today. And in 1995 it was 1.5 billion, 1,500 million. In 2003 it had gone up to about 2,000 million, so 2 billion. So what's happening now? So I had to go through all the countries of the world and find out all the data insofar as it was available. bit of guesswork here inevitably but my results were 2.3 billion now in 2018 which is still showing an increase in the number of English speakers around the world but not as rapidly as it was in the previous 10 years so people are still learning English all over the place and still wanting to still no other language is anywhere near replacing it as a global language but it doesn't seem to be increasing as rapidly as it was before, which is an interesting thought. OK, and now as someone who knows so much about language, I imagine that you are an expert language learner. I wish. Have you learned any other languages? Oh, yes. Well, I come from Wales, and Welsh is my second language. I wasn't born with it. I learned it as a second language living in Wales, and I still have it. I don't have much. opportunity to use it so I suppose you'd say I was sort of semi-lingual in Welsh rather than really fluent I couldn't have a conversation like this in Welsh for instance but I can have a perfectly normal everyday domestic conversation and that's the point you see when you say have you learned to language I mean it's to what level really a basic conversational domestic level or something more sophisticated now if or something even less than that I mean I can order a beer in a very large number of languages but that's about as far as it goes if you see what I mean. The problem is that when you're a linguist, a general linguist, and remember that's how I started, I wasn't just an English language specialist, I was a general linguist. You're interested in all languages. You want to learn all languages, or at least study them, analyse them, so you do as many as you can. Well, life is short and motivation is not there, so you do the best you can. So you learn one language to the extent of learning its basic grammar, basic pronunciation, few words of vocabulary and so on you get the hang of that language and you say great i've done that one now what's the next one you know so you end up learning knowing a lot a little about a lot of languages and there's never time to learn a lot about a few the only other language that i really learned to some degree was french i have given lectures in french so i was quite happy about that not very good lectures nonetheless but still i tried and i have had some conversations of a slightly more sophisticated nature in a couple of other languages Spanish I remember I used to go to Brazil quite a lot and you know my vocabulary for samba schools for school December it's really quite good but not for Brazilian politics perhaps so that's another thing you see which area of the language are you interested in have experience of opportunity to learn motivation to learn and then you might get quite fluent in that tiny area but the rest of the areas escape you all bilingual say this You know, they're good at... some areas more than others. I remember somebody who was a wonderful bilingual in English and French. She was an English person who had learned French. She went to France, worked there, had her baby, first baby in France, came back to England, had her second baby in England. She had no idea how to talk about babies in English because all her vocabulary was French vocabulary. She had to learn, as it were, the English equivalents of the French terms. even though she was a native speaker of English. So everybody, I think, has strengths and weaknesses in this sort of area, and I'm no different. So I can't really answer your question about how many languages, other than I've had experience of a lot. Enough, I think, to make me not scared of learning a language if I had the opportunity or the need to develop that skill. I mean, say I had to emigrate tomorrow. Say Brexit comes along and I don't want to... want to live here anymore or something like that and there are some people who say that then you want to go abroad and you end up living abroad well maybe then at least I'd have the basis of that language and it wouldn't take me so long to learn that language as somebody who was starting from scratch that's an important point isn't it and quite potentially quite a positive message for people who are learning a language oh I think so natural to feel some anxiety yeah when you start inevitable and you have to remember this that the natural condition for the human being on this planet is to be multilingual. Three-quarters of the world's population is bilingual. Something like half the world's population is trilingual. Go to places in Africa, they learn four, five, six languages without any trouble at all. But here's the point, not to equal translatability. It's not an European Union kind of I must translate everything in my language into everything in your language. No, I learn as much of the language as I need to go shopping or to go to church or whatever the context. is that you find yourself in and so that kind of unbalanced multilingualism is actually the norm and so everybody has to realize that they have this innate skill to learn more languages we see it in children people sometimes worry about children learning more than one language they don't need to worry I mean from the kids point of view they don't know it's more than one language you know a little two-year-old just knows that daddy speaks one way or mummy speaks another way or granny speaks another way. So I'll just pick these up. I'll mix them up a bit. Well, so what? I'm getting understood and I'm understanding them. And it's only when they're about three to three and a half on average that kids learn the names of the different languages and then realize, ah, so that is a different language from that one. And that's when they start trading the languages off against each other. If you study child language acquisition, for instance, you get these lovely examples. I remember one now of a three and a half year old had a French mother, German father, comes to bedtime. And the German father comes up to the kid and says in German, it's time for bed. And the kid says to the German father in French, I don't speak German. You see, trading one language off and realizing that these are different languages now. That ability doesn't come until the age of about three and a half. So to begin with, as far as the kid is concerned, all languages are equal. and it's lovely to have so many of them and it's important to try and foster that kind of innate curiosity by not forbidding one language as it were you know you must not speak that language in the home you must only speak this or that kind of thing try and foster as much language awareness as possible. Is there a sense because we in the UK most of us only speak one language do we have then a kind of warped perspective on language learning and a sense of so it's either all or nothing when you learn a language? Yes, I think we do. I think this is one of the sad things about the way language learning has gone in this country, that it has been so reduced in significance by, it's not a political point, successive governments over the years have simply played down the language side of things. And sometimes attempts made to build it up again, like let's have all primary school children learn a foreign language. Oh, but we haven't taught the teachers how to do this and all that. And... You know, so it has not been the priority that it should have been. And with the current political situation, the next generation of children growing up in a post-Brexit world, whatever that happens to be, they're going to need much more awareness of foreign languages than ever before, it seems to me. You know, there was a time when you could get by just with English. In many parts, not anymore. You know, if you're in competition with some other... company for a product, to buy products or to sell products, then the company that is able to converse with you even basically in your language is the one that's going to be favored you know and if you say oh sorry I can only talk to you in English please will you buy my goods but you have to speak English in order to do it and the answer is well sorry you know so and the more where we're in a trading situation around the world where multilingual ability is going to be going to be seen as an asset then the sooner we can get our younger generation to experience of these languages and I don't just mean the traditional languages of French and Spanish and German, I'm talking about Chinese and Japanese and Arabic and things like that, the better. Sobering thoughts. I think we're now at the point where we can put to you some of the questions from our viewers. So let's see what we've got. Interesting. So this is a question from Anu. Is accent really important? Yes, it is, because accent is a feature of identity, one of the main features of identity, accent and dialect together. Accent is a nuisance when it comes to intelligibility. Remember that contrast we had a little while ago. Accents can get in the way of intelligibility. But I suspect the point behind Anu's question is this, that if you're learning English... and I know this because many foreigners have told me this, do I have to learn an English accent, a British English accent or an American English accent? Must I sound like a native speaker in other words? And my answer to that is no. Once upon a time the answer was clearly yes. The more you sound British the better you're going to be. Well I'm sorry, no. If I'm speaking to a French person I want them to sound French because they are a French person. It's part of the beauty of their accent. that they do sound French, so long as I understand them of course. So that's the point. The accent mustn't be allowed to interfere with intelligibility. Once you've got past that stage, then be proud of your local accent. Be proud of who you are. And then it's a matter simply of increasing language awareness on the part of the people you're talking to who don't need to feel critical. After all, everybody is used to listening to a variety of accents. RP, Received Pronunciation, is a very important language. is the natural accent of only something like 2% of the population of England. Now, if you go to Wales, you won't hear it much. If you go to Scotland, you won't hear it much. Go to America, you won't hear it much, and so on. And what should I do? Say to the Welsh, oh, you must sound more English, or to the Scots, you must sound more English, or to the Americans, you must sound more English. Of course not, because we respect their identities. Well, my view is we should respect the identities of the language background of the place where whoever Anu is. others so that they proudly use their local accents so long as they've achieved that crucial step of being intelligible. Excellent. This is from, oh no name here, but the question is, do you think emojis affect linguistic ability? Maybe this relates to what we said before about text speak. It's the new craze, isn't it? And emojis will come, have come, and they will go. just like text messaging abbreviations came and have largely gone, even though some will stay. Emojis, likewise, a new craze. Never very many. We're only talking about 3,000 or so at the moment. There are new emojis suggested for implementation by the corporation that handles these things every few months. And a few months ago, a new batch of emojis were given official recognition. Interestingly... when you look at those. They weren't for new concepts, particularly. There were a few, but not many. No, the new emojis were identity things. In other words, no longer a white face, but a colored face. No longer male, but female. So suddenly it's identity. If I'm using an emoji and I am not white Anglo-Saxon male, then I don't want to be using a white Anglo-Saxon male emoji, and the emoji corporations have accepted this. and are now developing the emojis accordingly. But the total number of concepts that you can express using an emoji is really rather small. I mean, try and emojify, as it were, our conversation now, and you can see immediately it's hardly possible. Well, David, one of those new emojis recently was an emoji of a face with a beard, which is... There you go. And a white beard, I hope, not a coloured one like you've got. You know, I want a white beard emoji, please. But that's the point, you know. Emojis have... a limited expressive range very useful as far as they go I love using ...the occasional one. It can after all replace an entire sentence and make a joke, a bit of playful activity and an interaction with somebody, but it's never going to be able, you know, it's not like Japanese where the kanji system has developed... to a hugely sophisticated level with tens of thousands of kanji available there. It's not ever going to be like that. Great. Let's move on. Fabio asks, can you talk about the role of the native language or the first language on the second language learning process? Well, I no longer am very happy with the distinction between native and non-native, actually. It was never a very clear distinction for me, and it became even less clear when one started to study these new... global varieties of English. For instance, I remember talking a few years ago to an English secretary, now it was in one of the Emirates I think. Anyway, there she was and she met and fell in love. Oh no, it was a German industrialist who met a Malaysian secretary in this country. Now the German used English as a second language. The Malaysian girl used English as a second language. When they met and fell in love, they had to do it through the medium of English because neither knew the other's language. So they fall in love and they get married and they have a baby. And they decide as a matter of fact. of policy that the baby is going to learn English as its first language. A bit of German and Malay as well, but English mainly. The point is the German has a strong German accent and so on, and the Malaysian lady has a strong Malaysian accent. So this baby is now learning English as a second language, as its mother tongue, right? So suddenly the distinction between native and non-native becomes hugely fuzzy at that point. Now that baby is not alone. I was at a conference once where I asked the entire assembly, how many of you have got or know children like this who have been reared in that kind of bilingual situation where you're no longer sure how to rank the status of what the English... And something like a third of the audience put hands up, you know. So it's becoming an increasingly difficult matter to make that distinction. The other big thing, of course, is to notice that as a result of all the second language learning that's taking place around the world, you have this concept of English as a lingua franca emerging, which is a very important current trend. The fact that so many people are now speaking English fluently, but with a local distinctiveness that is no longer enabling them to be identified with a traditional British English native speaker or an American native speaker or whatever, and yet their fluency is at a comparable level. It's just different. And they use rules that... traditionally would be frowned upon like you know using uncountable nouns giving a countable sense to an uncountable noun like saying informations instead of information that kind of furnitures instead of furniture and this is so widespread now and it doesn't interfere with intelligibility at all and yet it's a very distinctive feature of these new varieties of English and you think well that's non-native but on the other hand you then and this is where my background comes in I say informations I know that word you go to the Oxford English Dictionary look up the word information and you'll see that it once upon a time had a plural amongst native speakers of English and still does in certain professions such as the legal profession so you suddenly realize that that just supposedly clear-cut distinction doesn't exist very interesting there's that leads us on nicely actually to the next question which asks, what are the future challenges for English as a lingua franca? Oh, in my view, the future challenges are all to do with cultural developments. There needs to be a cultural rapprochement between cultural studies and linguistic studies. The reason I say this is because when you look at these new varieties of English around the world, these new Englishes, as it were, and you say, what are the difficulties? I go to your country. In what way will I not understand you? What are the challenges? Well, you know, I'll understand your pronunciation probably and your grammar and your basic vocabulary. What I won't understand is the cultural identity that you are expressing through the English language. All your local flowers and animals and plants, your local myths and legends, your local stories about local streets, the suburbs of your country, the political parties, the nicknames you call your politicians, all these things. And there are so many dimensions of culture. The folklore, you know, your music, your folk tales and things of that kind, your television, the personalities on television. This sort of thing you and I would talk about if we were chatting routinely. without any thought about ourselves, our culture will be there. We go to a different part of the world, or the different part of the world comes to us, and they will understand what we're saying most of the time, but every now and then you and I will be there. and I will put into our conversation some piece of English and they'll go, excuse me, what do you mean? I might come out of a busy room and say, gosh, Matt, it was like Clapham Junction in there. And the poor listener will say, and by the way, it needn't be a second language learner listener. It might be an American or an Australian. They say, sorry, what's Clapham Junction got to do with this? And you have to explain, sorry, no, I meant it was chaos in there because you see, Clapham Junction is a very busy railway station, the busiest in the UK. and it's always chaotic when you go there and so the usage has developed that it was like Clapham Junction in there means what it means. Now in your part of the world what's your Clapham Junction? If I came to your country and you wanted to say it was chaos in there do you have an expression that was like that and if you do and you used it in your conversation I wouldn't understand it either you know and so when you think now of all the contexts where cultural issues of that kind crop up we are not talking dozens or hundreds, we are talking thousands, tens of thousands. How do I know? Because there are now dictionaries that have been written of South African English, Jamaican English and so on. And how big are these dictionaries? In the dictionary of South African English there are around 10,000 local words and expressions of this cultural kind. In a dictionary of Jamaican English, 15,000 local words and expressions that will not be used outside of Jamaica. That's my point. And every country that is developing a new English is evolving, as it were, lexicons that are like this. That's the biggest challenge, I think. So for teachers then, what's the way for them to deal with it? Is it a question of teaching their own culture, their own English background, or is it really a question of managing expectations among students and kind of making clear that there's a limit to what you can do with English until you get to that culture? We're now talking about curriculum and materials. which is not my world and the sad thing is that there is very little along these lines to recommend that people go to see or read at the moment but that will change because this is a relatively new area of English language teaching and learning but I think the first step is to establish amongst the learners in your class what are their interests what what what are they into as it were and it might be that they're into popular pop music or they're into motorbikes or they're into certain types of television program and so on i would then focus on that area and see what sort of cultural illusions are likely to turn up there not difficult to find this you'd only have to watch one soap on television or go to one website even and you will it can be a very simple website it can be a website about local travel traffic anything of that kind and just go and it'll suddenly you'll suddenly see references to you know in this country would be all the m25 oh gosh well sorry what's the problem there well you and I know but the m25 is a terrible road for getting around there's always traffic jams and things on it what's the m25 in your country that I wouldn't know you see so whatever the area is do a kind of interest analysis or needs analysis from the point of view of your learner learning group and then focus on that and just give them a hint of the complexity of cultural difference that exists and then gradually build on that as time goes by. Exactly how you do that is for other people to deal with rather than me I think. But really a question of raising awareness of this element of the language then? Absolutely awareness raising is the first thing and it shouldn't be too much of a surprise for the learners because they have precisely this kind of cultural awareness in their own country you know they know about cultural differences. The surprise might be oh so they're in English as well are they well yes they are and let's look at some of them some of them can be very obvious like differences between British English and American English you know we drive on one side of the road they drive on the other side of the road well probably most teaching materials will introduce the students to that at some point or another she basic basing oneself on what already is in the teaching courses about cultural differences but now developing it to a new order of magnitude given the changes have taken place in recent years. Fabulous. I think we have to leave it there, unfortunately, but Professor David Crystal, thank you very much indeed for your thoughts. Thank you for your interest. It's been a real delight. Thank you to all of you for watching, and this recording will be available on our YouTube channel very shortly, so do check back for that. Thanks, and bye for now.

for English language teachers as well. Don't forget that you can ask your own questions to Professor Crystal in the comments box underneath this video and we'll put those to him towards the end of the hour. So David welcome, hello.

Well thank you Matt, glad to be here. Let's start by one thing that comes across in all of your books and your talks, and that's your passion for English. I wonder if you could tell us how you keep that going.

How do you stay motivated and interested in what you do? Oh, because of the nature of the language, really, or the nature of languages in general. You see, the beauty about language is it's everywhere, to state the obvious, but that means it's varied so much.

There are so many different varieties of the language. Turn around any corner, you're going to see a new variety. of the language and it's basically saying to me, hey David, come and talk to me, you know, come and listen to me, come and read me. And then the other big dimension is that language changes so rapidly.

Whatever the English language was like yesterday, it's different today, it's going to be different tomorrow and it's so unpredictable in so many ways. And so that's another factor, you know, what's going to happen next? And that generates a kind of curiosity and enthusiasm.

And then the way in which people are so creative in their use of language. You know, however you've been taught English or whatever your language is, there comes a point when you want to play with it a bit. I mean, you might want to play with it professionally and become a novelist or a poet or a dramatist, or you just might want to crack a joke with somebody or put on a silly voice or any of these things. And it's that innate creativity that people have, which you see from a very early age in young children, you know, playing with the language from age, you know, three years old.

or four, that sort of period. And all of that produces a fascination and it's a fascination which generates enthusiasm and passion as you say. Is that language play something that's unique to English?

Oh no, every language has players. They play in different ways of course. Some languages like to play with sophisticated oratory for instance.

A language that has been written down will obviously have a great number of graphic forms of play. like crossword puzzles or Scrabble would be a better example perhaps which is pretty universal now but only of course in those languages which have been written down and of the six thousand or so languages in the world there are still a couple of thousand that have never been written down yet and and so they'll play with language in rather different ways and then there's another dimension to it if you have a radio and television network or that in which you get for example stand-up comedians and things of that kind or soaps that have a comedic input then that will generate people wanting to do the same sort of thing and they'll they'll copy what they see or hear on television and radio and play with language in those ways so the variety of language play is just as strong there was a very good example in the talk that you gave just now of that the way that we use language play or the language players used in slogans and advertising is that something that you see continuing this Advertising is one of the two big professional areas of language play. The other is newspaper headlines in certain types of newspaper where the headline writer wants to grab your attention and so the person does it by just playing with the language in a certain kind of way. I'm remembering one now.

If you're into cricket in Britain, you will know very well, Matt, don't you, that it sometimes rains in Britain. And as a result, the cricket... match is called off and so traditionally there was always a headline or a poster which after the cricket match was stopped which says rain stops play Rain stops play and anybody with a history of cricket awareness in Britain will remember that headline. Well one day in one cricket match a snake, an adder, got onto the pitch and actually bit a batsman. And he was in great pain.

So they called off the match. And the headline the next day was, Pain Stops Play. So if you know the background, you'll understand the joke.

If you don't understand the background, you have no idea. what that expression actually means. So newspaper headlines, yes.

And advertising, the other example you mentioned also, loves to play with language in that way. And that means playing with anything, playing with pronunciation, playing with grammar, playing with vocabulary, playing with spelling. Heinz beans, for instance. Beans means Heinz with a Z instead of the S. Well, it's a memorable slogan, but that's all language play.

And from the point of view of teaching, teachers, is there a place for that kind of play in lessons and does that benefit language learning? Oh, I think it does. And people sometimes think that language play is a very sophisticated thing so it's for advanced learners only.

Well, some of the more sophisticated kinds of play indeed will not be capable of being used and appreciated until later. But from the very beginning, children want to play with language. It's what they love to do. Language is fun right from the very outset.

The very first things that babies hear when they're out of the womb and in the real world for the first time is language play. No baby that's just come into the world is going to hear their parents, the parents or the midwife or the doctor or the nurse saying, you know, good morning, you are a baby. This is a hospital.

You have just been born. You know, you don't get that kind of thing. What you get is, oh, you lovely little baby, you are gorgeous baby.

And you get all this lovely, playful baby talk that everybody does, some more than others. And so from the very beginning, you're used to the phenomenon of, hey, what's going on here? There's a strange kind of language being used.

Sometimes people don't do it. Sometimes they do do it. And when they do do it, it's really fun. So I think play is there right from the very beginning of language acquisition.

What strikes me as you give that example is the physicality. of it and how that impacts on, I suppose, on the child's language. Yeah, and the linguistic structure of it too. People think that baby talk, although it might be quite instinctive, has no structure.

Oh, it does. If I say to you, oh, you lovely little Baba, you are, you are, you are, there are three things going on there. First of all, there's a great deal of lip rounding.

Oh, you lovely little Baba. I mean, that's unusual for English, isn't it? We don't lip round very much in English. We do so when we're talking to babies.

talking to pussycats and things, or pussy, pussy, pussy, and, of course, talking to your most intimate associates, or can I have a little kiss then from your best beloved, for instance. But lip rounding is not normal, so playfully it is. And then the second thing is the pitch range of a piece of baby talk. Did you notice how I started very high? Here you lovely little baby.

Then I went very low. This is very unusual in everyday conversation. I don't meet you in the street and say, Matt, how are you today?

It's lovely. to see you. You know, I don't use pitch range in that way, but we do with baby talk. And the third thing about baby talk, did you notice the repetition?

Yes, you are, you are, you are. Again, we don't do that kind of thing in everyday conversation. I don't meet you in the street and say, oh, Matt, hello, how are you? How are you?

How are you? How are you? You know, we don't do that. But in baby talk, we do. So language play breaks all the rules, if you like.

And that's part of its attraction. So that suggests, if you're a teacher, that suggests that perhaps repetition is going to benefit students. It suggests that exaggerated physicality and exaggerated pitch might also benefit them in some way.

Is that fair to assume? So long as the context is motivating towards enjoyment rather than intellectual learning of some kind. Because to repeat, you know, this is a table, this is a table, you know, ten times, although it's sometimes done, is not really a most motivating experience.

But if you're dealing with something that is fun, like, say, you're playing with puppets, or watching a cartoon or just working out the way children might play a game, or for a more adult-type audience, some of the more sophisticated forms of enjoyment, joke-telling and things like that, then that kind of emphasis on pitch range and repetition will be, I imagine, extremely valuable. Excellent. If you've just joined us, we're here live with Professor David Crystal at Robinson College in Cambridge, part of the Cambridge University Press Better Learning Conference.

David, you mentioned there that it's changes in the language that keep you motivated, keep you interested. Are there any recent changes in the English language that you think it would be particularly useful for teachers to know about? Oh, lots and lots, really. We don't want to overemphasise this. Change only affects a couple of percent of the language at any one time.

you know, 90, I don't know what, 95, 98% of the language that you and I are using now is exactly the same as we would have been using if we'd been doing this interview in 1990 and in 20 years time it'll be the same. But that 2, 3, 4% would have been the same. whatever it is, is really interesting.

And the reason why I'm vague about the percentage is that it depends very much on which aspect of language we're thinking of. With vocabulary, for instance, it's a higher percentage. Maybe about 5% of the vocabulary of English either goes out of use or new words come into use in any given year. Two or three words come into the English language every day, according to some of the studies. Every day?

Every day, yes, absolutely. Or two or three... new senses of old words or new senses coming from new contexts like technology, which we can talk about in a bit if you like.

So vocabulary is the place where most changes obviously manifest, but, and grammar by contrast, relatively little. There are some grammatical changes that are taking place. For instance, the changes in the auxiliary verbs. Most learners of English at one time or another will have been taught that there's... There's an auxiliary verb, must.

You must do this, I must do that, he must, she must do this sort of thing. Well, the frequency of use of the word must, which used to be quite high, has gone down and down and down and down and down and down and down. And instead of must, these days people are saying have to.

You have to do this, man. If I say, you must do this, man, it sounds rather authoritarian, doesn't it? And I'm telling you.

Whereas if I say, you have to do this, I'm basically saying, you have the option of saying yes or no. It's a friendlier kind of approach. Is that the sign of a more egalitarian society? I think it is, yes, absolutely. A more egalitarian society.

However you interpret it, the statistics are very, very clear. When you go into the big corpora of data, you will see must going down and have to going up. So there are some grammatical changes, but not very many.

And then we've got pronunciation, which of course is continuing to change in a steady, slow way, as it always has. The graphic side of things, orthography. Spelling, spelling doesn't like to change very much, it's a very conservative medium, but punctuation does. And so especially with the internet and the things that are happening there to the graphic medium, we're seeing a lot of changes in punctuation which surprise some people. Some people get very upset about it because they've been taught how to punctuate and now we're seeing the internet doing new things.

And so it can be a bit of a surprise. So yes, there's change happening all over the place, but a different... rates depending upon different aspects of the language.

I suppose for teachers the vocabulary, new vocabulary is fairly easy to get to grips with. Changes in grammar, maybe it's a good thing that there aren't that many of those because that tends to be much more difficult to deal with those from the point of view of materials or tests and things like that. Yes, it is.

The problem with vocabulary is there is so much of it. If we're talking about two or three words coming in every day, I'm talking about words coming in to a fairly standard kind of way. of colloquial English and not yet talking about the new vocabulary from the different varieties of English around the world, you know.

I'm talking just about say British English there but think about what's going on say in American English or Australian English or Indian English or all the other new varieties of English. Add that vocabulary and you've got a really massive mountain to climb or at least to try to cope with. So that is the main problem, the quantity of vocabulary. Yes, grammar Not so bad, so long as you've learned your... The basic rules of grammar haven't changed in 500 years.

Is it necessary for learners to try and cope with all of that? I used to live in Malaysia, and there's a very distinct Malaysian dialect of English. They call it Manglish. Manglish, yeah. And I didn't speak that when I went over there.

I kind of feel that learning that or experiencing that is part of your... That's part of... the joy of travelling, is it something that you feel students should be able to get to grips with or is there a kind of minimum core of English that you need to know in order to be able to travel and cope with these regional differences?

Oh yes, my answer is both. There are two big forces that drive language always. One is the need for intelligibility. We have to understand each other. And that motivates the development of a standard language, standard English in this particular case.

And standard English is essentially a written form of English. printed form of English, which some people speak quite naturally, but not very many. Most people speak a regional form of English to begin with, and they learn standard English in school. So intelligibility is there to guarantee we understand each other within a country, and these days, of course.

internationally. The other big force driving language is the need for identity. We have to say who we are and where we're from and that motivates the growth of accents and dialects both at a national level and an international level.

I want to sound British I don't want to sound American. Americans want to sound American not sounding British and so on for all the varieties of English around the world. Now when you get to a country like Malaysia or Singapore for instance or R&D Indeed, so many countries now, we see two forms of English in place.

We see a natural, evolving kind of English, which you learn on the streets with your family, with the kids, and so on. And that sometimes has a label, like Manglish. Sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes it's just called the local Creole or something like that.

And then you go to school and you learn standard English. And my point is that one needs both. It's not that one should replace the other or one should criticize.

the other. You need both because we are human beings that are both outward looking, we need to understand the rest of the world and they us, and inward looking, we need to be ourselves and not like the rest of the world. And so we need both.

So the question is, how do you implement this balance in not just a teaching context, but in a widespread political context? Because we're talking here about, you know, curriculum design and, you know, national policy. I remember in Singapore, for instance, some years ago, I was last there in the late 1990s, and there was a big controversy going on as to whether Singlish, in this particular case, should be supported or dispensed with.

There was a criticism of a soap that was on television at the time, and I think the Prime Minister at one point said, they really have to stop speaking Singlish on this soap, you know. They must speak standard English, otherwise what will our children and what will... the viewers be able to do and if Singlish takes over we won't understand the rest of the world and they will not understand us. But at the same time, Singlish, he said, you know, we want to be Singapore and not the rest of the world, where Singlish of course would be a perfect marker of identity. So you can't have your cake and eat it, you know, you need both and somehow one has to devise a language policy which allows both.

Yes, that's interesting and at a very small level, maybe at the level of individual schools, you may have seen the story recently about a school that banned the use of the of the word like. Yes. Yeah.

Well, that showed a misunderstanding of what the word like is all about. When a kid said, what people don't like about the word like, and this is the context of, you know, so I was like saying this and she was like doing that and I was like doing the other. That's the kind of context we're talking about. And what irritates people is the overuse of it. Any word that is overused will irritate.

I can make you hate any word in the English language. language by overusing it really. I really can, no really.

I can start really using a word for really just a few seconds now and really and every observer of this interview is going to say please David stop using the word really. You're using it to I hate the word really. Really. Now same thing has happened to like.

Like actually has a very important role in narrative. In linguistics we call it quotative like. Because if somebody says, so I went like, wow, write that down. How will you write it down? You say, I went.

Inverted commas, wow, close the inverted commas. It's like a quotation. And like replaces the quotation marks. And so it's a very important feature of natural narrative. So a kid who's using like all the time is actually telling you a very fluent...

story but unfortunately overusing this way of linking the various parts of the story now some people say well why don't you replace the word like with something like the word say so I said wow and the answer to that is that like actually has a more general meaning because it can be used in relation to facial expressions. So I can in conversation to you go like this, I can say, so I went like, and the gesture, I can't now say say, because I can't say a gesture, can I? You know, the like actually has a broader usage than any other verb like I said this or I went this or whatever it might be. So it has a real value and I don't see it as a a sign of deterioration in the language, I see it actually as a sign of increasing expressive richness in the language, but kids who use it, and adults now of course, who use it, have to beware that if they don't overuse it, otherwise it will draw attention to itself and that will distract from the meaning of the message and that's always a bad thing.

I notice that it's always was like or I went like, so the verb be... It's always the verb to be, got to be there, the verb to be has got to be there. As if something...

that teachers should be teaching as a form of reporting speech using be like? Well it's a usage that has certainly come into being. It's not new.

You can trace that use of the word like back to the 18th century but it's new in the sense of frequency and a new generation has grown up really loving it and so well I would now make a distinction between production and listening comprehension and to some extent reading comprehension. comprehension as well. The kids have got to realize that this is a widely used construction. They can, if you like, be taught to use it.

Now I'm out of my comfort zone now because I'm not a teacher, remember, I don't teach in class day by day. How you teach it and when you teach it is a matter of curriculum and things like that. But at some point they have got to know about it if they are going to encounter natural conversation amongst kids of their own age in other cultures. and I would say that that is a given they're going to have that and if they're not going to travel to those cultures they're going to see it online and any any YouTube experience or anything like this is going to present them with this construction at some point so getting to grips with it and not being scared of it and being confident to use it but not to overuse it I think it's very important.

If you're just joining us we're here live from Robinson College at the University of Cambridge part of the Cambridge University Press Better Learning Conference and we've got the great pleasure of being joined by Professor David Crystal, who's talking to us about changes in the English language. I suppose the logical question following on from all of this is how do teachers stay on top of these changes? What can they do to kind of keep up with what's going on? With great difficulty. It's easier now than it used to be, thanks to the Internet.

Once upon a time, if you wanted to find out about Australian English or South African English or Nigerian English or whatever it might be, you had to go there. or at least meet somebody from there. These days, it's just so easy.

If I want to find out about South African English, I just go to Google and type in South African English. Up will come lots of South African sites, newspapers, and things like that, political party statements with all the terminology of the local politics from South Africa. And these days, of course, quite a lot of South African pronunciation coming in as well.

So I can tune my ears to all of this that's going on. Now the question is, you know, how do you grade this in terms of curriculum? My view on this is that one should expose students to this at the earliest possible age or stage of language learning. Just like language play, exposure to new varieties of English is not something that should be seen as an advanced level because it's there from the outset.

And the kids these days are going to be encountering it. on the internet anyway, you know, in social media and things like this. So I think it's important to integrate it somehow. And I'm remembering now some of my first exposures to learning foreign languages where I had the fortune to be exposed to it in this way.

I remember learning on the BBC once upon a time German from a series called Kommit, Wir sprechen Deutsch. And the first episode of that had a proper piece of German. learning.

You know, where I learned a certain construction and a certain bit of vocabulary, like traditionally you would. And then the presenter said, OK, now we're just going into that bar over there, just have a listen. You're not going to understand all of it, it doesn't matter. Just get a feel for the rhythm of the language. the speed of the language, the way they interact with each other, and just let it wash over you.

And I thought, this is so good, because it's making the language experience real for me. I still can't communicate very much with them, but I'm getting a sense of... Well, how I have to tune my ears in order to understand my simple sentences when they're being spoken by that guy who's going to say them in a slightly different way from my teacher.

And I thought this was very valuable. And I think the same thing might apply to English. Absolutely. It's interesting that use, I suppose, at that point it was television that was the technology that's enabling that. And the other thing that's very difficult for teachers to keep on top of is changes in technology.

Now, you've written quite a bit about how... language has evolved along with technology. How do you see that going in the future?

Oh, very unpredictable. I mean, that's the thing about technology. It is so unpredictable.

You don't know what's going to happen next, and every consequence of what happens next is going to have linguistic implications. I'll give you an example of this happening. In 2006, something very strange happened. Up until then, people sent...

text messages to each other. So I send you a text message on the mobile phone, on your cell phone, and it says something very important like, you know, I am on the train, or I am eating corn flakes, and I send the message to you, and you need to know this, because you're a friend or a spouse or something, and it's an important thing. If you had said to me in 2005, the next big thing is going to be you put those text messages on the internet so that everybody will be able to read them. I would have said you were nuts.

But that's what happened. It was called Twitter. Twitter is SMS, a short messaging service for the internet.

So now I send to Twitter, I am on the train or I am eating cornflakes. And anybody can read this now. And you think that'll never work. Twitter was the fastest growing internet experience of that 2006 and years following period. So hugely successful.

Now, why? Because the prompt was, what are you doing? What are you doing? That was the 2006 prompt. Now, think of it from a linguistic point of view.

You're going to answer that question. How are you going to answer it? You're going to have first-person pronouns.

You're going to have present tenses. I am on the train. I am eating cornflakes.

We are doing this. Then, in November 2009, Twitter changed its prompt. The new prompt was, and still is, you know, what's happening?

Tell us what's happening. As soon as you get what's happening, everything changes. Third person pronouns now.

This is happening, that's happening, he's doing something, she's doing something, they're doing something. Different tense forms. Something has just happened. Something is about to happen. And suddenly you realize that the language has suddenly become much more all encompassing than it was before.

And Twitter became something more of a news reporting service than a personal trade off like text messaging. Now who would have predicted that in October? 2009 you see and at any point in time Twitter can change its policy again and the same for now any other Internet medium internet channel as soon as somebody changes the policy and talks about a new kind of privacy Situation or whatever it might be is an implication for language. So It's a bit unpredictable Having said that I don't see it as a big deal For teachers because as before only a tiny percentage of it internet language is different, makes the language different from what it was before. You know, you go online now in 2019 and you look at online reports from 29 or 1999 or 1989 and you look at the language and it's really basically the same.

Just a few changes here and there, we're talking a low percentage, 1%, 2%, something like that. You're going to know about these changes, but it's not a big deal. know, in terms of the overall mass of the language that people have got to learn. Okay, and I guess similarly, how do you keep on top of things? We've got here at Cambridge, we've got the Cambridge Corpus, which is a huge body of English that allows us to track changes in the language.

Have you got something similar that you work with? I just look at all these corpora, yeah. I've got access to at least a dozen corpora at home and some of these guys keep their corpus right up to date and of course Cambridge has its new world. dictionary which is every month I look at that just to see what have you guys found this month that I didn't know about before and there's usually words there that I hadn't come across before so you keep on on top of this kind of thing and when you do regular samples of usage using the devices that are available to at the moment like the big data corporate and and you use a clever bit of software that says what's new compared with last time it's one way of keeping in touch having said that. These days I always feel a little bit out of touch.

Heck, you know, I'm in my late 70s. How am I going to keep in touch with the kids? Well, one answer is, go and ask them.

So I visit schools quite a lot and talk to six... forms, that is kids of around about age 17, 18 doing A-level English language. Not usually much younger, but that sort of age range.

And the reason is because some of my books are on the syllabus for A-level. And so I meet these kids. kids and we talk about this sort of thing and they are not slow in bringing me up to date on the latest slang and the latest things they say and I might hazard a particular thing to them and they say, you know, we don't do that anymore, I mean really David, you know, get up to date. I mean I can give you an example, text messaging abbreviations. You know, when text messaging started all these new abbreviations came in like C for C and U for U.

later with an 8 in the middle rather than the syllable. And when it came in around about the early 2000s, this was thought to be the greatest thing ever by the youngsters. You know, this was really cool stuff. And adults, of course, criticized it enormously.

And it developed into a kind of peak of usage around about 2008, 9, 10, something like that. Anyway, I used to go into schools, as I said. And one of the things I would do is, in advance, I'd ask the teacher to arrange with the kids.

to get a collection of their texts together so we could look at the abbreviations and see how they were using them. Well, I was in a school just earlier this year and I'd asked the kids to do that and they showed me their text messages. There wasn't a single abbreviation to be seen. So I said to them, where have your abbreviations gone?

And they looked at me as if I was from a different planet and said, you know, they're not cool anymore. We used to do that when we were kids, said these 16-year-olds, you know, at age 10. and 11. Maybe they're new, but by 16, oh, boring, you know. And then one kid clinched it for me. He said, I'll tell you when I stopped abbreviating. He said, I stopped when my dad started.

You get the point? When adults steal young people's slang, it's no longer cool anymore. And certainly adults have started to do things like see you and things like that. So for the kid's point of view, let's move on.

Let's find something different. Let's do emojis or something different. different that wasn't there before. I guess one thing that's happening there is that we don't use SMS messages so much anymore, which had a limit, they had a character limit. Messaging services now don't have that limit.

And they have predictive texting and things like that, so you don't need the abbreviations as much as you used to. And in many ways, surely that kind of sensitivity to the context demonstrates quite advanced language proficiency, doesn't it? Oh yes, I mean this was one of the big myths about text messaging earlier on, that because because the kids were using abbreviations and things like that, it was going to affect their literacy.

They're not spelling properly, they're going to end up having lousy literacy scores. Well, people started researching that. And what they showed, mainly psychologists rather than linguists, but what they showed was that texting actually increases literacy scores. Makes you better, a more literate person.

Why? Because you're more likely to because text messaging and all the associated stuff is giving you extra practice in the language. I mean, what improves your reading and writing? If you read and write. The more you read and write, the better.

Adults would say, or at least some of those early pedants would say, oh, but they're not reading Dickens or Shakespeare. No, they're not, but they are reading more than I was at their age. When did you last never see a teenager walking along the road reading and writing?

all the time you know it's everywhere and so that kind of extra literacy was a very noticeable feature of the period along with this point and that is that abbreviations are breaking the rules if you ask a teenager in those days and still to some extent why do you use different language and they say cuz it's cool because it's fashionable because it's like with my mates and you say okay But if it's cool to break a rule, you have to know that the rule is there in the first place in order to break it. In other words, you have to have quite a sophisticated knowledge of spelling and things. The best texters always are the best spellers. And if you are a poor speller, for example, if you have dyslexia, you're not a good texter as a result in those days because you just can't handle the rules. So it's a much more sophisticated thing than people think.

And I see it, once again, as a good feature. of language skills development rather than something bad. Excellent.

Before we go on to the next question about Professor Crystal's books, remember that you can send your own questions to us by adding them in the comments box just below and we'll put those to him towards the end of this interview. But you mentioned your books there that you go into schools and present those. You've just released the third edition of the Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language. And I wonder if you could tell us what's different in... this new edition from the previous edition?

Ooh, yes. Well, it is so different. It's the third edition, yes, and if you look at the changes between the first edition and the second, there really wasn't that much. The big difference, of course, was... was the arrival of the internet.

In 1995, the first edition, for most people, there was no internet. I mean, the World Wide Web had begun in 1991. Most people didn't start emailing until the mid-1990s, you know? And so nothing on the internet in 1995. And then second edition, 2003, oh, I've got to put chapters in on the internet. So fine.

But between 2003 and 2018, when I finished it, so much has happened in terms of internet activity apart from anything else so that section has grown enormously so you know think social media to think 2003 right no Facebook 2004 no YouTube 2005 no Twitter 2006 etc etc no whatsapp no Instagram so suddenly you realize you've got to put a huge amount of extra stuff in there so that was one of the big differences and then the points of detail everywhere the you the fact that all the statistics on English as a global language had to be re-researched. Because everybody wants to know how many people speak English as a global language today. And in 1995 it was 1.5 billion, 1,500 million.

In 2003 it had gone up to about 2,000 million, so 2 billion. So what's happening now? So I had to go through all the countries of the world and find out all the data insofar as it was available.

bit of guesswork here inevitably but my results were 2.3 billion now in 2018 which is still showing an increase in the number of English speakers around the world but not as rapidly as it was in the previous 10 years so people are still learning English all over the place and still wanting to still no other language is anywhere near replacing it as a global language but it doesn't seem to be increasing as rapidly as it was before, which is an interesting thought. OK, and now as someone who knows so much about language, I imagine that you are an expert language learner. I wish. Have you learned any other languages? Oh, yes.

Well, I come from Wales, and Welsh is my second language. I wasn't born with it. I learned it as a second language living in Wales, and I still have it.

I don't have much. opportunity to use it so I suppose you'd say I was sort of semi-lingual in Welsh rather than really fluent I couldn't have a conversation like this in Welsh for instance but I can have a perfectly normal everyday domestic conversation and that's the point you see when you say have you learned to language I mean it's to what level really a basic conversational domestic level or something more sophisticated now if or something even less than that I mean I can order a beer in a very large number of languages but that's about as far as it goes if you see what I mean. The problem is that when you're a linguist, a general linguist, and remember that's how I started, I wasn't just an English language specialist, I was a general linguist. You're interested in all languages. You want to learn all languages, or at least study them, analyse them, so you do as many as you can.

Well, life is short and motivation is not there, so you do the best you can. So you learn one language to the extent of learning its basic grammar, basic pronunciation, few words of vocabulary and so on you get the hang of that language and you say great i've done that one now what's the next one you know so you end up learning knowing a lot a little about a lot of languages and there's never time to learn a lot about a few the only other language that i really learned to some degree was french i have given lectures in french so i was quite happy about that not very good lectures nonetheless but still i tried and i have had some conversations of a slightly more sophisticated nature in a couple of other languages Spanish I remember I used to go to Brazil quite a lot and you know my vocabulary for samba schools for school December it's really quite good but not for Brazilian politics perhaps so that's another thing you see which area of the language are you interested in have experience of opportunity to learn motivation to learn and then you might get quite fluent in that tiny area but the rest of the areas escape you all bilingual say this You know, they're good at... some areas more than others. I remember somebody who was a wonderful bilingual in English and French. She was an English person who had learned French.

She went to France, worked there, had her baby, first baby in France, came back to England, had her second baby in England. She had no idea how to talk about babies in English because all her vocabulary was French vocabulary. She had to learn, as it were, the English equivalents of the French terms.

even though she was a native speaker of English. So everybody, I think, has strengths and weaknesses in this sort of area, and I'm no different. So I can't really answer your question about how many languages, other than I've had experience of a lot. Enough, I think, to make me not scared of learning a language if I had the opportunity or the need to develop that skill. I mean, say I had to emigrate tomorrow.

Say Brexit comes along and I don't want to... want to live here anymore or something like that and there are some people who say that then you want to go abroad and you end up living abroad well maybe then at least I'd have the basis of that language and it wouldn't take me so long to learn that language as somebody who was starting from scratch that's an important point isn't it and quite potentially quite a positive message for people who are learning a language oh I think so natural to feel some anxiety yeah when you start inevitable and you have to remember this that the natural condition for the human being on this planet is to be multilingual. Three-quarters of the world's population is bilingual.

Something like half the world's population is trilingual. Go to places in Africa, they learn four, five, six languages without any trouble at all. But here's the point, not to equal translatability.

It's not an European Union kind of I must translate everything in my language into everything in your language. No, I learn as much of the language as I need to go shopping or to go to church or whatever the context. is that you find yourself in and so that kind of unbalanced multilingualism is actually the norm and so everybody has to realize that they have this innate skill to learn more languages we see it in children people sometimes worry about children learning more than one language they don't need to worry I mean from the kids point of view they don't know it's more than one language you know a little two-year-old just knows that daddy speaks one way or mummy speaks another way or granny speaks another way. So I'll just pick these up.

I'll mix them up a bit. Well, so what? I'm getting understood and I'm understanding them. And it's only when they're about three to three and a half on average that kids learn the names of the different languages and then realize, ah, so that is a different language from that one. And that's when they start trading the languages off against each other.

If you study child language acquisition, for instance, you get these lovely examples. I remember one now of a three and a half year old had a French mother, German father, comes to bedtime. And the German father comes up to the kid and says in German, it's time for bed.

And the kid says to the German father in French, I don't speak German. You see, trading one language off and realizing that these are different languages now. That ability doesn't come until the age of about three and a half. So to begin with, as far as the kid is concerned, all languages are equal. and it's lovely to have so many of them and it's important to try and foster that kind of innate curiosity by not forbidding one language as it were you know you must not speak that language in the home you must only speak this or that kind of thing try and foster as much language awareness as possible.

Is there a sense because we in the UK most of us only speak one language do we have then a kind of warped perspective on language learning and a sense of so it's either all or nothing when you learn a language? Yes, I think we do. I think this is one of the sad things about the way language learning has gone in this country, that it has been so reduced in significance by, it's not a political point, successive governments over the years have simply played down the language side of things. And sometimes attempts made to build it up again, like let's have all primary school children learn a foreign language.

Oh, but we haven't taught the teachers how to do this and all that. And... You know, so it has not been the priority that it should have been.

And with the current political situation, the next generation of children growing up in a post-Brexit world, whatever that happens to be, they're going to need much more awareness of foreign languages than ever before, it seems to me. You know, there was a time when you could get by just with English. In many parts, not anymore.

You know, if you're in competition with some other... company for a product, to buy products or to sell products, then the company that is able to converse with you even basically in your language is the one that's going to be favored you know and if you say oh sorry I can only talk to you in English please will you buy my goods but you have to speak English in order to do it and the answer is well sorry you know so and the more where we're in a trading situation around the world where multilingual ability is going to be going to be seen as an asset then the sooner we can get our younger generation to experience of these languages and I don't just mean the traditional languages of French and Spanish and German, I'm talking about Chinese and Japanese and Arabic and things like that, the better. Sobering thoughts.

I think we're now at the point where we can put to you some of the questions from our viewers. So let's see what we've got. Interesting.

So this is a question from Anu. Is accent really important? Yes, it is, because accent is a feature of identity, one of the main features of identity, accent and dialect together. Accent is a nuisance when it comes to intelligibility. Remember that contrast we had a little while ago.

Accents can get in the way of intelligibility. But I suspect the point behind Anu's question is this, that if you're learning English... and I know this because many foreigners have told me this, do I have to learn an English accent, a British English accent or an American English accent?

Must I sound like a native speaker in other words? And my answer to that is no. Once upon a time the answer was clearly yes. The more you sound British the better you're going to be. Well I'm sorry, no.

If I'm speaking to a French person I want them to sound French because they are a French person. It's part of the beauty of their accent. that they do sound French, so long as I understand them of course. So that's the point. The accent mustn't be allowed to interfere with intelligibility.

Once you've got past that stage, then be proud of your local accent. Be proud of who you are. And then it's a matter simply of increasing language awareness on the part of the people you're talking to who don't need to feel critical.

After all, everybody is used to listening to a variety of accents. RP, Received Pronunciation, is a very important language. is the natural accent of only something like 2% of the population of England.

Now, if you go to Wales, you won't hear it much. If you go to Scotland, you won't hear it much. Go to America, you won't hear it much, and so on. And what should I do?

Say to the Welsh, oh, you must sound more English, or to the Scots, you must sound more English, or to the Americans, you must sound more English. Of course not, because we respect their identities. Well, my view is we should respect the identities of the language background of the place where whoever Anu is. others so that they proudly use their local accents so long as they've achieved that crucial step of being intelligible. Excellent. This is from, oh no name here, but the question is, do you think emojis affect linguistic ability?

Maybe this relates to what we said before about text speak. It's the new craze, isn't it? And emojis will come, have come, and they will go. just like text messaging abbreviations came and have largely gone, even though some will stay.

Emojis, likewise, a new craze. Never very many. We're only talking about 3,000 or so at the moment. There are new emojis suggested for implementation by the corporation that handles these things every few months. And a few months ago, a new batch of emojis were given official recognition.

Interestingly... when you look at those. They weren't for new concepts, particularly.

There were a few, but not many. No, the new emojis were identity things. In other words, no longer a white face, but a colored face.

No longer male, but female. So suddenly it's identity. If I'm using an emoji and I am not white Anglo-Saxon male, then I don't want to be using a white Anglo-Saxon male emoji, and the emoji corporations have accepted this.

and are now developing the emojis accordingly. But the total number of concepts that you can express using an emoji is really rather small. I mean, try and emojify, as it were, our conversation now, and you can see immediately it's hardly possible. Well, David, one of those new emojis recently was an emoji of a face with a beard, which is...

There you go. And a white beard, I hope, not a coloured one like you've got. You know, I want a white beard emoji, please. But that's the point, you know.

Emojis have... a limited expressive range very useful as far as they go I love using ...the occasional one. It can after all replace an entire sentence and make a joke, a bit of playful activity and an interaction with somebody, but it's never going to be able, you know, it's not like Japanese where the kanji system has developed... to a hugely sophisticated level with tens of thousands of kanji available there. It's not ever going to be like that.

Great. Let's move on. Fabio asks, can you talk about the role of the native language or the first language on the second language learning process? Well, I no longer am very happy with the distinction between native and non-native, actually.

It was never a very clear distinction for me, and it became even less clear when one started to study these new... global varieties of English. For instance, I remember talking a few years ago to an English secretary, now it was in one of the Emirates I think. Anyway, there she was and she met and fell in love. Oh no, it was a German industrialist who met a Malaysian secretary in this country.

Now the German used English as a second language. The Malaysian girl used English as a second language. When they met and fell in love, they had to do it through the medium of English because neither knew the other's language. So they fall in love and they get married and they have a baby. And they decide as a matter of fact.

of policy that the baby is going to learn English as its first language. A bit of German and Malay as well, but English mainly. The point is the German has a strong German accent and so on, and the Malaysian lady has a strong Malaysian accent. So this baby is now learning English as a second language, as its mother tongue, right? So suddenly the distinction between native and non-native becomes hugely fuzzy at that point.

Now that baby is not alone. I was at a conference once where I asked the entire assembly, how many of you have got or know children like this who have been reared in that kind of bilingual situation where you're no longer sure how to rank the status of what the English... And something like a third of the audience put hands up, you know.

So it's becoming an increasingly difficult matter to make that distinction. The other big thing, of course, is to notice that as a result of all the second language learning that's taking place around the world, you have this concept of English as a lingua franca emerging, which is a very important current trend. The fact that so many people are now speaking English fluently, but with a local distinctiveness that is no longer enabling them to be identified with a traditional British English native speaker or an American native speaker or whatever, and yet their fluency is at a comparable level. It's just different. And they use rules that...

traditionally would be frowned upon like you know using uncountable nouns giving a countable sense to an uncountable noun like saying informations instead of information that kind of furnitures instead of furniture and this is so widespread now and it doesn't interfere with intelligibility at all and yet it's a very distinctive feature of these new varieties of English and you think well that's non-native but on the other hand you then and this is where my background comes in I say informations I know that word you go to the Oxford English Dictionary look up the word information and you'll see that it once upon a time had a plural amongst native speakers of English and still does in certain professions such as the legal profession so you suddenly realize that that just supposedly clear-cut distinction doesn't exist very interesting there's that leads us on nicely actually to the next question which asks, what are the future challenges for English as a lingua franca? Oh, in my view, the future challenges are all to do with cultural developments. There needs to be a cultural rapprochement between cultural studies and linguistic studies. The reason I say this is because when you look at these new varieties of English around the world, these new Englishes, as it were, and you say, what are the difficulties?

I go to your country. In what way will I not understand you? What are the challenges? Well, you know, I'll understand your pronunciation probably and your grammar and your basic vocabulary.

What I won't understand is the cultural identity that you are expressing through the English language. All your local flowers and animals and plants, your local myths and legends, your local stories about local streets, the suburbs of your country, the political parties, the nicknames you call your politicians, all these things. And there are so many dimensions of culture. The folklore, you know, your music, your folk tales and things of that kind, your television, the personalities on television. This sort of thing you and I would talk about if we were chatting routinely.

without any thought about ourselves, our culture will be there. We go to a different part of the world, or the different part of the world comes to us, and they will understand what we're saying most of the time, but every now and then you and I will be there. and I will put into our conversation some piece of English and they'll go, excuse me, what do you mean?

I might come out of a busy room and say, gosh, Matt, it was like Clapham Junction in there. And the poor listener will say, and by the way, it needn't be a second language learner listener. It might be an American or an Australian.

They say, sorry, what's Clapham Junction got to do with this? And you have to explain, sorry, no, I meant it was chaos in there because you see, Clapham Junction is a very busy railway station, the busiest in the UK. and it's always chaotic when you go there and so the usage has developed that it was like Clapham Junction in there means what it means.

Now in your part of the world what's your Clapham Junction? If I came to your country and you wanted to say it was chaos in there do you have an expression that was like that and if you do and you used it in your conversation I wouldn't understand it either you know and so when you think now of all the contexts where cultural issues of that kind crop up we are not talking dozens or hundreds, we are talking thousands, tens of thousands. How do I know?

Because there are now dictionaries that have been written of South African English, Jamaican English and so on. And how big are these dictionaries? In the dictionary of South African English there are around 10,000 local words and expressions of this cultural kind.

In a dictionary of Jamaican English, 15,000 local words and expressions that will not be used outside of Jamaica. That's my point. And every country that is developing a new English is evolving, as it were, lexicons that are like this.

That's the biggest challenge, I think. So for teachers then, what's the way for them to deal with it? Is it a question of teaching their own culture, their own English background, or is it really a question of managing expectations among students and kind of making clear that there's a limit to what you can do with English until you get to that culture? We're now talking about curriculum and materials.

which is not my world and the sad thing is that there is very little along these lines to recommend that people go to see or read at the moment but that will change because this is a relatively new area of English language teaching and learning but I think the first step is to establish amongst the learners in your class what are their interests what what what are they into as it were and it might be that they're into popular pop music or they're into motorbikes or they're into certain types of television program and so on i would then focus on that area and see what sort of cultural illusions are likely to turn up there not difficult to find this you'd only have to watch one soap on television or go to one website even and you will it can be a very simple website it can be a website about local travel traffic anything of that kind and just go and it'll suddenly you'll suddenly see references to you know in this country would be all the m25 oh gosh well sorry what's the problem there well you and I know but the m25 is a terrible road for getting around there's always traffic jams and things on it what's the m25 in your country that I wouldn't know you see so whatever the area is do a kind of interest analysis or needs analysis from the point of view of your learner learning group and then focus on that and just give them a hint of the complexity of cultural difference that exists and then gradually build on that as time goes by. Exactly how you do that is for other people to deal with rather than me I think. But really a question of raising awareness of this element of the language then?

Absolutely awareness raising is the first thing and it shouldn't be too much of a surprise for the learners because they have precisely this kind of cultural awareness in their own country you know they know about cultural differences. The surprise might be oh so they're in English as well are they well yes they are and let's look at some of them some of them can be very obvious like differences between British English and American English you know we drive on one side of the road they drive on the other side of the road well probably most teaching materials will introduce the students to that at some point or another she basic basing oneself on what already is in the teaching courses about cultural differences but now developing it to a new order of magnitude given the changes have taken place in recent years. Fabulous.

I think we have to leave it there, unfortunately, but Professor David Crystal, thank you very much indeed for your thoughts. Thank you for your interest. It's been a real delight.

Thank you to all of you for watching, and this recording will be available on our YouTube channel very shortly, so do check back for that. Thanks, and bye for now.

Transcript for:Insights from Professor David Crystal's Lecture

Transcript for:
Insights from Professor David Crystal's Lecture